Ovid got it wrong

It's hard to see why the Roman poet was so miserable in Romania, says Sarah A Smith. Summers are long and hot, the landscape is idyllic - it's enough to inspire a few lines of verse from anyone

Few cities have been as maligned as the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta. It was here that the Roman poet Ovid wrote some of the world's most self-pitying verse. He was exiled to the foreign city (then known as Tomis) in AD8 and spent the last eight years of his life writing about it.

Ovid didn't like the freezing cold water; the people were uncouth; the earth was barren. "A more dismal land than this lies not under either Pole," the elegist complained in Letters from Pontus.

The poet wrote Letters and the earlier Sorrows of an Exile for a purpose: to persuade his emperor that this was no place for a Roman gentleman. But even given poetic licence, Ovid got the Dobrogea region of Romania wrong. Summer is long and hot here, autumn balmy, and snow falls only sparsely each winter. Every town of any size has enough museums (archaeological, ethnographic, visual arts) to clear them of the charge of barbarity. And since the collapse of Communism, it has become a land of plenty.

The narrow country roads have an implausible number of horse-drawn carts laden with cereal crops; plump women by the roadside wait beside piles of sweetcorn, aubergines, peppers and watermelons. Every garden is thickly planted with herbs and vegetables and many have vines and fig trees. It is scarcely a place in which "wherever you gaze lie plains with no tillers, vast steppes which no man claims".

Constanta has forgiven its most famous inhabitant. The university bears his name, his glum statue stands in the wide, cobbled Piata Ovidiu, and Tomis gets a namecheck on a major boulevard and shopping mall. But the city can afford to be lenient: the curving bays and sandy beaches here and in Constanta's satellite resorts bring in a healthy summer tourism. And Ovid's caustic poetry is not the only trace of the Graeco-Roman world. Up and down the coast, from the Danube delta town of Tulcea (the ancient port of Aegyssus) in the north to Mangalia (the Greek city of Callatis) in the south, lie enough ruins to divert anyone looking for more than beaches and delta birdwatching.

There are so many sarcophagi, fallen pillars and lengths of city wall that not every town knows what to do with them. In the pretty resort of Mangalia, 43km south of Constanta, masonry sprouts from municipal flowerbeds and the middle of a roundabout. The four-star Hotel President has cunningly positioned itself virtually on top of the old Greek city wall; visitors can step down from the lobby to peer at the remains and an inscribed stone tablet.

Constanta's quotient of ruins is even greater. The archaeology museum is the finest in the region and houses a good collection of Roman friezes and statuary, including the unsettling Glykon serpent (2nd to 3rd century AD) with its coiled snake's body and half-man, half-animal head. Next door is an extravagant and vast Roman mosaic pavement, its colours subdued but its intricate design still largely intact.

Epochs jostle for position. There is a labyrinth of walls beside the Orthodox cathedral, at the southernmost tip of the city, scattered with oddments of masonry. Behind the archaeology museum, among pine trees at the bottom of the hill, lie columns, gravestones and broken tablets. No one visits this unwieldy detritus apart from Romania's ever-present stray dogs. Further along are the unmarked remains of the walls of the Roman baths, standing incongruously beneath the Art Nouveau mansions that recall another strand of Constanta's past.

Not all of this heritage is so haphazardly displayed as it is on the coast. Some 62km west of Constanta, close to the village of Adamclisi, stands a reconstruction of the Tropaeum Traiani, erected AD109 to celebrate Trajan's conquest. Visible for miles around, it is a lonely structure, so little visited that no one staffs the gates. One reason for its abandonment is immediately apparent. This is Roman architecture reconfigured as Socialist Realism, with a robotic, faceless warrior perched menacingly on top. Rebuilt in the Seventies, it suggests one regime laying dubious claim to another.

The remains of the city of Histria, on the coast between Tulcea (80km) and Constanta (50km) and close to the village of Istria, are untouched. As we arrive, six sad dogs surround our car, hoping that we come bearing food. A caretaker rushes from her house to unlock the airy museum and take our entrance fee. Having seen a lot of pillars and Thracian horsemen, we make a brief tour of the displays and then turn off towards the site. In five minutes we are alone with the ruins and the reeds and water of Lake Sinoi.

A flock of pelicans fly past in formation and, having failed to see anything more exciting than a great egret on an earlier trip to the delta proper, I take them as a good omen. As with the rest of Dobrogea's classical sites, the remains here are a layering of Greek, Roman and Byzantine, but on a much bigger scale. Each corner brings the visitor to another section of what was once the region's most important port: a market place, living area, bathhouses and a series of temples. It is sobering that what was once a major settlement is now an isolated ruin. We feel like explorers, stumbling upon a lost city.

On one side of the town, empty fields stretch away, punctuated only by the occasional bush. On the other, the vast lake laps at the land. And finally I get a sense of what Ovid found so unnerving about Dobrogea. There would have been no natural protection here from the marauding tribes who so terrified him. And there would have been little to do; even the busy ports of Histria and Constanta could not have been a match for Rome. Perhaps for a depressed poet, with only the "inhospitable sea" for inspiration, this really was "the land that's almost at the world's end".

Traveller's guide

Getting there: British Airways (0845 77 333 77; www.ba.com) and Tarom (020-7224 3693; www.tarom.ro) each fly daily between London Heathrow and Bucharest's Otopeni airport. Return fares on British Airways start from around £224.

Red tape: British passport holders no longer need visas for short visits to Romania.

Getting around: trains are frequent and reach most parts of Romania, but they can be slow. Trains from Bucharest's Gara de Nord station take three hours to cover the 140 miles to Constanta. Fares are low; the above journey costs £6 for a first-class, single fare.

Through Holiday Autos, cars cost (0870 400 4400, www.holidayautos.co.uk) from £305 for seven days rental. For those without transport, Danubius (00 40 241 615836; www.danubius.ro), B-dul Ferdinand 36, organises trips between May and October: to Mangalia (€18/£13), Adamclisi (€41/£27 including lunch) and Histria (€59/£39).

Staying there: at the Hotel Dali in Constanta at Strada Smardan 6A (00 40 21 33 55 541) a double room is €120 (£86). In Mangalia, a double at the Hotel President, Strada Teilor 6 (00 40 21 33 00 628) costs €56 (£40). All prices include breakfast.

More information: Contact the Romanian National Tourist Office, 22 New Cavendish Street London WIM 7LH (020-7224 3692; www.romaniatourism.com).